That distinction kept surfacing at the Shift Collective retreat in Comporta last month. Thirty SaaS founders, two days, ARR ranging from £500k to £15 million. I went in expecting to hear about reinvented funnels and new GTM playbooks.
What I heard was curiosity about whether any of that existed yet, and a lot of honest admission that it didn't, not really, not for them.
The data broadly supports what I heard in that room. McKinsey's 2024 State of AI report found that sales and marketing functions have among the highest rates of AI adoption across business functions, yet the same report notes that most of that adoption is concentrated in content generation, call summarisation, and lead scoring. The mechanics of how deals get made, how trust gets built, how customers get won, those haven't materially changed. Forrester's research from the same period found that fewer than 20% of B2B buyers said AI-driven outreach influenced their purchase decision positively. A significant portion said it made them more skeptical.
That tracks with what the founders in the room were saying. The AI GTM tools exist. The ROI on them is unclear. And the volume of AI-generated outreach hitting buyers right now is making people harder to reach, not easier.
One founder reframed the whole thing around trust, and it's the clearest way I've heard it put. AI is collapsing the cost of building a product. When the cost of building collapses, the thing that determines whether a product wins is no longer how hard it was to make. It's distribution, and underneath distribution, it's trust. Whether a customer trusts you enough to pick you over the ten alternatives that can now be built just as fast.
That inverts the usual fear. Most founders worry AI makes their product easy to copy. The sharper concern is that it makes everyone's product easy to build, which means the moat was never the software. It was the brand, the relationship, the accumulated trust with customers who chose you and kept choosing you.
The GTM implications of that aren't fully worked out yet. Nobody in that room had a clean example of a company that had fundamentally restructured how it sells around AI and come out with measurably better outcomes. That gap is real. It's also probably temporary. The playbooks will emerge, and when they do they'll likely look less like automation and more like personalisation at scale, using AI to get closer to individual customers rather than to reach more of them faster.
For now, the founders I'd bet on aren't the ones with the longest AI tool stack. They're the ones getting closer to their customers while everyone else is busy retooling.
Build got cheaper.
Trust got more expensive.
The GTM question is how you compound that.
Alex
Founder, Shift AI
P.S. Everyone’s figuring out AI. Shift AI Europe is where you compare notes: Tickets are live at europe.shiftai.events.
The Shift · Published every Tuesday · shift.ai
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